HPE Wants to Build and Manage Your Private Cloud

Hewlett-Packard Enterprise knows it is complex, time-consuming and costly for enterprises to build and operate their own private clouds. So the company is launching a new service to do it for them.

At its HPE Discover conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday, the company introduced HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise, a new offering in which the company will design, install, manage and maintain private clouds for customers in their data centers, edge locations and colocation sites.

The solution is not one-size-fits all. HPE will deliver server and storage infrastructure and software that meets the unique needs of customers, whether they have workloads on bare metal, virtual machines, containers or a combination of all three, HPE executives said. Instead of paying upfront for IT infrastructure, organizations can better manage costs through a pay-as-you-go model. 

“What we’ve done is we’ve brought a cloud experience to them, where their applications sit and where their data sit at a very low latency that the public cloud can’t provide,” said Vishal Lall, senior vice president and general manager of HPE GreenLake Cloud Services Solutions, during a briefing with the media.

HPE on Tuesday also announced HPE GreenLake for Data Fabric, a managed service that eliminates data silos and creates a single data store of on-premises and public cloud data for analytics and other needs, Lall said. The company also unveiled new GreenLake services for block storage, data backup and recovery, disaster recovery, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and industry-specific services for payments and customer engagement.

Related:HPE GreenLake Adds Analytics and Data Protection Services

The announcements are HPE’s latest innovations for its GreenLake platform, the company’s on-premises solutions that are offered through a cloudlike, subscription-based, as a service model. The company in 2019 announced plans to make every product it sold available as a service – and its success prompted other hardware makers, including Dell and Cisco, to pursue similar strategies.  

In fact, HPE executives on Tuesday said GreenLake adoption continues to grow. GreenLake now has more than 1,600 customers, totaling $7.1 billion in total contract value. That’s up from nine months ago when the company announced it had 1,200 customers and $5.2 billion in total contract value.

Analysts say Tuesday’s announcements help round out HPE’s GreenLake portfolio of services and enable enterprise customers to implement a hybrid cloud more easily.

HPE initially launched GreenLake to provide servers and storage through a subscription-based model. Then over time, they’ve added more features and functionality to simplify IT management and give enterprises a push-button software-driven, cloud-like experience, said Steve McDowell, a senior data and storage analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, in an interview with Data Center Knowledge.

Related:HPE Gives Bullish Forecast on Stronger Internet Gear Sales

For example, HPE GreenLake for Backup and Recovery, announced Tuesday, enables enterprises to back up their on-premises workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS), while the HPE GreenLake for HCI service, also unveiled Tuesday, enables organizations to move workloads to the public cloud, he said.

“What they’ve announced is the continuing evolution of GreenLake. It’s a lot of steps forward in terms of multicloud functionality. This is hugely important for HPE because they’re continuing to outrun their competition in delivering that cloud-like experience,” McDowell said. “Now, not every IT shop wants it. Some just want servers and storage. But for the ones that truly buy that vision, this is a great set of announcements.”

HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise

HPE’s Lall said the company’s key announcement Tuesday is its HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise. It provides organizations with a self-service private cloud for both cloud-native and traditional applications, the company said.

“It’s very easy to scale. We can pre-provision capacity in certain cases,” Lall said. “Customers have the ability to deploy in minutes, so if they want to run a VM or containers, they can really provision it in minutes and get going.”

HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise is a managed service that includes full lifecycle management, including installation, provisioning, firmware updates, maintenance operations, hardware replacement, growth planning and support, the company said in a blog post. Through a unified management portal, organizations can easily track capacity, usage and costs.

Matt Kimball, a senior data center analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, said the Private Cloud Enterprise offering bundles HPE’s existing hardware, software and professional services that they’ve previously offered. They’ve just never offered them in a single package.

“It’s a combination of things they’ve already been selling, but it’s the way they bundle it, integrate it, manage it and bill it that makes it unique,” Kimball told DCK.

Kimball believes the offering will interest many enterprise IT organizations who are under pressure to pursue digital transformation. To do digital transformation, they must start with IT transformation, but it’s difficult to build a private cloud and replicate the ease of use of a public cloud, he said.

For example, enterprises may have separate virtualized, containerized and bare metal environments, but the tools to manage these environments are disjointed. They may not have it set up to provide users the resources they need through a self-service model, such as machine learning-as-a-service, he said.

HPE’s value proposition is that they can build and manage it for the enterprises, Kimball said.

“IT organizations very rarely are able to find the right integration points for all these tools to work together. What HPE is saying is we will take care of all that for you,” he said. “We understand the API libraries and know where to integrate. We will do all the back end for you instead of you trying to waste hours trying to set it up and optimize it.”

HPE said the new GreenLake offerings, including HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise, will be available in September 2022.

The company on Monday also announced that its long-time partner IBM Red Hat is joining the HPE GreenLake ecosystem. The companies will work together to combine the GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform with Red Hat’s open-source technologies, such as Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, the companies said.